Mr. Speaker, I believe that the criteria of the government's accountability and independence vis-à-vis lobbyists have not been met. The reasons are outlined in the Bloc Quebecois's minority report which also proposes solutions.
The report prepared by the Reform Party, which believes that the Liberal report has two major shortcomings, namely insufficient disclosure and the way the ethics counsellor is appointed and his accountability, concurs with the report by the Bloc Quebecois as far as these problems are concerned. However, perhaps because of the expertise acquired in Quebec concerning the financing of political parties, the Bloc Quebecois went much further, making some concrete proposals that may improve the situation. Having listed these proposals in my speech, I will not repeat them. But as we are about to enter the next century and we see that governments have less and less control over international decisions and the way things are done, I believe this will be one of the criteria people will use in determining whether their government is doing its best to ensure adequate development for their country.
People can understand that we can no longer control all the variables and that we live in a very complex world, but they will never accept that those variables may be controlled by others than their elected representatives. I believe that, in choosing their representatives, voters will systematically come back to
the following criterion: they will want to make sure that their elected officials really represent them and are not continuously influenced, with varying degrees of transparency, by lobbies that do not reflect the opinions of the electorate.
Having been made aware, since I was elected, of all the twists and turns involved in bringing about a policy decision, it is obvious that what people want is for their elected representatives to have control of what is going on and not simply be the puppets of people who have received no mandate from the voters. I think that the government will have to go back to the drawing board. I do not know whether it will have the courage to do so during this Parliament, but this whole issue will surely remain a fundamental one for voters, and the suggestions that were made by the Bloc Quebecois in its minority report will prove to be an interesting guide in this respect.